Paulos Mar Gregorios: A Reader

By K. M. George

Paulos Mar Greogorios: A Reader is a compilation of the selected writings of Paulos Mar Gregorios, a metropolitan of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India and a former President of the World Council of Churches. The book deals with his thought in the areas of ecumenism, orthodox theology, philosophy, interfaith dialogue, and philosophy of science. The book will be of special value to the students of ecumenism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, Indian philosophy, interdisciplinary studies, and holistic education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506430171

Book preview

Introduction

Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios (1922–1996), formerly known as Paul Verghese, a versatile Indian philosopher, theologian, and leader of the ecumenical movement, was a prolific writer and speaker. Some of the fields where he made seminal contributions include the ecumenical movement as represented particularly by the World Council of Churches, global peace and nuclear disarmament movements, holistic health and healing, inter-faith and inter-ideological dialogues  involving  major  religions  and  secular  ideologies,  faith-science debates and environmental ethics for a sane human future, and cross-cultural and philosophical searches for a new Enlightenment paradigm.

Born in a traditional Orthodox Syrian Christian family at Trippunithura, Kerala, India, on August 9, 1922, the young Paul was a brilliant student and a fervent Christian seeker. After high school he had various stints with the local newspapers as a freelance journalist, a transportation company, and the Indian Post and Telegraph Department. He left for Ethiopia as a teacher at twenty-five. After three years of teaching in government schools, he went to the United States for college. Returning to India, he joined the Fellowship House associated with Union Christian College at Alwaye, where he taught as honorary lecturer and also assumed leadership of the Orthodox Student Christian movement. When the emperor Haile Sellassie of Ethiopia visited India in 1956, Paul Verghese, who had already come to the attention of the emperor as a brilliant teacher who mastered the  Amharic  language,  was  invited  to  be  on  his  staff  as  his  aide and advisor on education. After five years of service at the imperial court, he returned to the United States to continue his theological education at Princeton, Yale, and Oxford. He accepted ordination as priest in the Indian Orthodox Church in 1960. The newly ordained Father Paul Verghese was one of the three Bible study leaders at the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi in 1961, where he acquired a reputation for his perceptive biblical exegesis and remarkable communication skills. Soon he was invited by Dr. Visser’tHooft to Geneva to be Associate General Secretary of the World Council of Churches.

In 1967 he resigned his position in Geneva and returned to India to be Principal of Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kottayam, Kerala. In 1975 he was consecrated bishop of the Indian Orthodox Church and was given the monastic name Mar Gregorios. He assumed responsibility of the Delhi diocese while continuing to be principal of the seminary in Kerala, as willed by his church. Mar Gregorios often shuttled between Kottayam and New Delhi while also discharging his many international commitments for about two decades until his death at his New Delhi residence in 1996. During this period he was also elected to the Presidium of the World Council of Churches and was made the president of the Indian Philosophical Congress for a term.

After his death, Mahatma Gandhi University at Kottayam, a secular state university, instituted Dr.Paulos Mar Gregorios Chair at the University in honor of his contributions to society at large. Though he remained a committed Christian and a teacher of theology, several leading secular intellectuals and academics in India, including some Marxist theoreticians, openly acknowledged their indebtedness to Mar Gregorios for his insightful teachings and his broad-based competence and sense of direction in current sociopolitical issues as well as in scientific and technological advances and their impact on humanity.

In the present volume we are gleaning from a wide range of his writings in a fairly representative manner. This, of course, is not easy since one has to discern the major thrust of the texts as well as the multilayered references and nuances of the author’s thinking. While going through the body of his writings in the selection process, my constant question to myself was whether Mar Gregorios himself would agree with what is highlighted as his major emphases in different domains. My conviction that the present selection would correspond to his taste is based on the sole ground that I had known him as my teacher, mentor, and spiritual father for nearly three decades. As a student and then as a young colleague I had the privilege of being invited to be a sounding board for some of his ideas as they emerged in his mind. Soon after his death I was rather reluctant to write and publish anything substantial about his teachings, despite prompting from several friends, lest I corrupt the clarity and power of his thinking through the clumsiness of my own interpretation.

His holistic vision transcended the strictly academic confines of theology and philosophy, and he attempted to redefine them in light of his multifaceted interdisciplinary explorations in various forms and fields of human knowledge. His search for the total picture of Reality was not unlike, for instance, the contemporary quest of some scientists for a theory of everything. He was incessantly looking for the thread that connects ever-divergent ways of knowing—in science and technology, in the social sciences, in medicine and cognitive sciences, in literature, arts, and music, and in meditational and spiritual techniques. He was searching for a paradigm of paradigms that would transform our perception and experience of the present reality as understood my most people. His search for the whole provided him with new hermeneutical keys to interpret anew the nature and calling of philosophy, theology, and the sciences.

The breadth of his intellectual-spiritual journey is only partly captured in his written words. People who had a chance to listen to him would remember how felicitous his oral expression was. He spoke with analytical clarity but never lost the total picture. His way with words as he dealt with new ideas emerging from current scientific research and contemporary socioeconomic and political discourses often delightfully surprised even the specialists in those fields, though at times the positions he took provoked many people.

The rationale for a reader that provides a selection of texts from the writings of Paulos Mar Gregorios is obvious. Spread out in a broad spectrum of disciplines and fields of interest, they may not provide easy access to the common reader. Therefore, a modest attempt is made here to share with a wider circle of readers some of his key insights into the nature of Reality. Ever since his death, the Mar Gregorios Foundation of the Orthodox Theological Seminary at Kottayam has been publishing his papers and articles in thematically organized volumes.

Some traits that recur in his writings may be noted, since they need some explanation for general readers. First, Mar Gregorios disliked the expression third world, used in political-economic and cultural discourses for some three decades ever since the 1960s to distinguish the economically poor nations from the rich Western European and North American nations. For Gregorios it was a question of human dignity and not economic development. So he preferred to use the expression Two-Thirds World to indicate the vast majority of world population, who were exploited and subjugated by the power wielding nations. His general criticism of the West arose from the colonial and neocolonial context, where during his lifetime the West was the symbol of economic and political domination, and the rest of the world was always at the receiving end. In dealing with Christian theological issues, particularly in the early patristic period, Mar Gregorios speaks about the Asian-African heritage that shaped Christianity in the first millennium. For him, almost all major fathers of the church in the East came from parts of Africa and Asia, like Egypt and Cappadocia, which had very different cultural and spiritual sensitivities from the Roman/European West.

Second, Mar Gregorios often makes reference to the Eastern Orthodox approach to ethical and theological issues, and he identifies himself with it. Technically his mother church in India belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family, which includes Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Syrian churches. This family is in close dialogue with the Eastern Orthodoxy of the Byzantine liturgical tradition. Mar Gregorios is one of the pioneers who initiated informal theological dialogues in 1964 between the Oriental Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox families. Except for the Christological debate and division originating at the Council of Chalcedon at 451, there is almost total affinity between these two families in all theological and spiritual positions. Whenever he identifies himself with the Eastern Orthodox, he uses that term in a comprehensive way, assuming the common theological ground of both families.

Third,  Mar  Gregorios  was  positively  sensitive  to  the  issue of gender-inclusive language. He always stood for the dignity and rights of women. As to discourse on God, he believed that no linguistic or conceptual categories could be of any use. However, he opts for the traditional masculine pronoun with full awareness of its inadequacy and exclusionist interpretations.

Finally, in the selected passages there are internal references to other chapters or passages not included in the present volume. We have not edited out these references, since they might help an interested reader who wants to explore further. The reader may note that ellipses/ [ . . . ] in numerous places in the Reader indicate the omission of brief or long passages in an otherwise continuous text.

I wish to express my profound gratitude to my young colleague and former student Father Jogy George Cheruvathoor who, after his doctoral studies in Rome, has now joined the faculty of St. Thomas Orthodox Theological Seminary, Nagpur, India. Though I had begun the work of selection some eight years ago, it was not continued until Jogy volunteered to assist me in all technical aspects amid his other responsibilities. For his readiness for hard work, his positive spirit, and his sincere commitment to this project, I am only grateful.

Several friends and colleagues who volunteered to assist in the preparation of the book deserve to be gratefully mentioned: Leena Varghese, Ruby Robins, KC Jacob, Joseph Varghese, Johnson Jacob, Joyce Thottackad, John Kunnath, Babu John, and my clergy-colleagues O. Thomas, Bijesh Philip, Abraham Thomas, Ashwin Fernandes, Thomas Varghese, Robins Daniel, Aashu Alexander, Jeo Joseph, and the staff of Mar Baselios College of Engineering and Technology, Peermedu, Kerala.

My special thanks go to Dr. Babu Sebastian, Vice Chancellor, Mahatma Gandhi University, and Dr. Panneerselvam, General Secretary, Indian Philosophical Congress, for their support and encouragement. It was a visit of the Fortress Press team—publisher Will Bergkamp and editor Jesudas Athyal—to India in September 2016 that gave real momentum to the whole process. I am grateful for their deep interest in the life and work of Paulos Mar Gregorios.

K.M.G.

I

Philosophy—Western and Indian/Asian

Mar Gregorios’s move to New Delhi in 1975 marked a major widening of his contacts with Indian philosophers and academics, particularly in monasteries and universities in North India. He began cultivating close friendship with eminent religious leaders like the fourteenth Dalai Lama and contributed regularly to the sociopolitical and cultural discussions in the capital city. A member and regular visitor to the library of India International Centre and a guest lecturer at places like the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University, Mar Gregorios was a sought-after speaker and teacher. He also spent three months as a fellow at the reputed Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla in the Himalayas, where he wrote his highly acclaimed Enlightenment East and West. He also provided space at his official residence for two initiatives that reflected his major concerns, namely, Niti Shanti Kendra (Centre for Justice and Peace) and Sarva Dharma Nilaya (House for all Religions).

He was well grounded in both Western and Indian philosophical systems. His knowledge of European philosophy from its beginnings in the classical Greek  tradition  and  more  particularly  in  the  Neoplatonic  and  Greek patristic  streams  to  twentieth-century  philosophers  made  him  critical of contemporary Western philosophy’s turning away from the transcendent. Two of his major works focus critically on the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its consequence for the rise of secular ideologies and intellectual movements that ignored or denied the transcendent dimension. Mar Gregorios called for a new enlightenment and  turned  to  Indian/Asian  philosophical  resources,  particularly  the Buddhist stream, as providing sane philosophical grounding for an alternative that links the material and the transcendent in a holistic and all-connecting awareness. He is particularly fond of the Buddhist expression, samyag sambhodi, the most harmonious awareness.

Philosophy for Mar Gregorios is not simply an academic pursuit as we often see in university faculties but a deep commitment. He would suggest a collaboration between the university and a good monastery (mutt), the former providing the academic rigor of study and research and the latter the discipline of prayer, self-control, community living, and compassion. He would also advocate an ongoing dialogue of natural and human sciences with literature, art, music, and religious philosophies since he is convinced that science has no monopoly on truth. While appreciating the contribution of science and technology to human civilisation, Gregorios wants sci-tech, particularly from an Indian context, to integrate the values from all religions as well as from secular traditions. He holds that some of the major problems of a secularised world and sectarian religions can be solved by an evolving spirituality grounded in secularity.

Philosophy, Meaning, and History—Problem of Methodology

The Meaning of Meaning

It is notoriously difficult to settle the meaning of meaning. The English word meaning comes from the same root as mind and mental, related to Latin mens and Sanskrit manas. Its basic connotation is: an idea that is intelligible, an aim or purpose, the significance that is to be conveyed by words, looks, or other gestures or actions; the understanding of how something fits in with other things and how it functions. The Latin root sensus comes from sentire, that is, to perceive through the senses, to feel the import of something, to have in consciousness, to understand the significance of.

We are seeking the meaning of human life and human history, to discover how my existence as well as the existence of others—present, past, and future—makes sense in two senses: (a) a coherent pattern and (b) an overall purpose. These two meanings of meaning should be kept together, that is, how human life and history fits into the whole and what its general goal and purpose are.

There may be a third sense in which meaning can be understood, related to the other two: What accounts for human life and history? We can take these three aspects together, that is, (a) the origins of human life and history, (b) a goal toward which it seems to be moving, and (c) a coherent pattern in terms of which we can grasp and understand the functioning of life and history and how it fits in with the whole. To what extent these questions are answerable and what are the methods used for answering these questions, which have several subquestions implied within them, would be a basic concern of this book.

Some of the developments in modern structural linguistics and semiology are relevant here, but we refrain from going into an involved discussion of semantic relations, deep grammar, logical syntax, Carnap’s semiotics, or the study of patterned human behaviour in communication in all its modes. I can only pay tribute to the famous Polish logician Alfred Tarski who in the 1930s provided the neopositivists of the Anglo-Saxon world with a workable definition of truth—a definition I find unacceptable. I must also pay tribute to the clarifications provided by Roland Barthes’s Semiology but regret my inability to follow his  overly complex methodology of deriving meaning.

The Problem of Pattern in History

We need to find a "gestalt, a structure, a pattern in terms of which we can make sense" of the welter of contradictory phenomena that we observe about human existence and history. This pattern or gestalt should be composed of rules or laws and principles that are of a general or universal nature.

In the physical realm, at least in Newtonian mechanistic science, we were prone to seek all understanding in terms of the principle of causality and universal laws. In the human realm we may have to introduce a secondary principle of human intention or purposive action as an additional principle of explanation. So if we are to understand human life and history, we need a causal explanation of what causes what in human existence, and if human purposive action is not entirely predetermined by causal factors (a possible assumption), then we need to integrate such purposive action into the explanation of the meaning of life and history.

There are those who have argued that history has no meaning at all—that it has neither pattern nor coherence, neither laws nor lessons. We will do well to leave these skeptics like Ranke alone and to pay more heed to Benedetto Croce, who advised us to combine philosophy with history. We can listen to Bishop Bossuet, who believed that history was the manifestation of divine providence, or to Giambattista Vico, who having paid tribute to divine providence on the first page of his book proceeded to work out his science of history with laws of history that would be as true as the laws of nature.

Vico is still important, for his basic proposition that history moves through three stages remains popular in the West, particularly in Germanic thinking. The basic pattern of Vico was progress from savage life, to barbaric life, and then to civilised life. Behind this pattern are intuitions about Africa, Asia, and Europe, Europe being the home of the only real civilisation with science, law, and the state rationally set forth. The idea of progress seems to be an indispensable backdrop to European historiography, which seems to imply also the idea that Europe is the acme of progress. Hegel would even say that in Europe itself the Prussian nation was ahead of the rest.

If we want pattern in history, we must ask the questions of Montesquieu about the causes of national greatness and decay: Is it the genius of extraordinary human beings or the power of accumulated knowledge in a society? The inventions of scientists and technicians or the blood of superior races? The conditions and relations of economic production and distribution or the peculiarities of geographical location, climate, and soil?

Montesquieu believed that climate was decisive, that the North was vigorous, and that the South was lazy. So masters came from the North (but why not from the South’s temperate zones?) and slaves from the South. H. T. Buckle corrected him that this applied only to the early stages, before the mastery of science and technology, but still the category of progress is definitely weighted in favor of the West or the North. Even Hegel was something of a geographical determinist who thought the existence of the Mediterranean Sea as a means of communication accounted for much in ancient history (of the Mediterranean countries, but not exclusively). One could ask why India or Sri Lanka did not develop in the same way, being surrounded with water.

There may be some truth to the assumption that the determining factors of history are not uniform at all times, that new factors emerge in history to change history. The argument, however, seems to be between the relative influence of geographical (and climatic), racial, mental, and economic factors, but can one completely ignore the role of religious factors, especially understanding something of current history in Poland?

Marx himself would see the three stages of human existence as the hunting-pastoral, agricultural-handicraft, and, lastly, the industrial-technological.[1] He agrees with Hegel that reality is in motion and should be understood as such. He also agrees that this motion is not unilinear but dialectical; on the surface, one may see the identity or the this-ness of the process, but without understanding the contradiction and negation of this this-ness that lies underneath, one does not understand the true identity of reality or history. The surface is only a face; identity depends on the unity of the face and what lies behind it. The true identity of history is thus an identity of identity and non-identity, that is, the unity of the phenomenological surface and the contradiction underneath.

The surface may hide the reality, and in the course of development, the reality underneath comes out and changes the surface—the Umschlag, or the abrupt, leaplike transformation that erupts to change the face of society. It transforms the face or identity of the whole to its opposite, while underneath the old contradictions give place to new ones that keep operating beneath the surface. New identity generates new contradictions; the old contradictions are under Aufhebung, that is, under suspension, not annihilated—they will emerge in new forms later on.

This is Hegel’s contribution, which Marx generally accepted. But he had to turn Hegel upside down in some other respects, especially in the two false assumptions in Hegel, according to Marx, of the primacy of mind over matter and in the direct and necessary rather than indirect and conditional identity between the contradictions within any given unity.

Methodologically, these are both very decisive for the detection of pattern in history—the methodological problem of the starting point and the ontological problem of the nature of the identity between contradictions. (PEW 28–32)

What to Do with Philosophy?

If you ask a Western philosopher, What is the task of philosophy? one can expect today two types of answers: (a) Philosophy is the analysis  and  criticism  of  received  social,  scientific  and  religious statements,  and  the  reconstruction  of  principles  and  categories indispensable to correct theories or sound policies of action.[2] (b) Philosophy is the integrating vision of reality and its coherent interpretation. The latter, which is also generally the Indian view, is however, becoming a view very difficult to sustain, for three reasons.

1. Such an undertaking requires the integration of all available knowledge; the expansion of human knowledge in the present century has been so vast as to preclude the possibility of any one mind, even with the aid of a most sophisticated computer and information retrieval system, integrating it all into a coherent pattern.

2. Even if one mind could coherently comprehend all knowledge, the knowledge by itself is not capable of yielding categories and principles by which to integrate it and extract there from the meaning of the whole.

3. Modern science is far from sanguine about the objective givenness of the world. It was only classical physics that could think of nature as a deterministic system subsumable under deterministic laws. Quantum physics does not see causality and determinism as universal. The universe is a system indeed, but only partly determined; in large part, it is a system of possibilities with a high degree of indeterminacy.

Does this situation lead inevitably to a total abandonment of the larger philosophical enterprise in the West? Not really. Certainly even today the West is more productive than the East in generating new philosophies. But an examination of these new systems or types of philosophy will reveal some clear differences between the philosophical enterprises as we understand it in the East and as they conceive it in the West. (PEW 368–69)

[ . . . ]

The Two Poles of Knowledge:

The Subjective and the Objective

In any case, the West has gone far on the analytic path, practically neglecting the holistic and the intuitive-synthetic. And as they have proceeded further on that road, they have become feebler and feebler in their capacity to have holistic visions. And as they progressively lost sight of the transcendent in which this world is grounded, they had to ground their certainty in an analysis of either the objective world given to consciousness or the subjective world of consciousness itself.

One can see almost all modern Western philosophical systems as attempts to find certainty either through systematic, careful, detailed analysis of the subjective consciousness (phenomenology) or of a more feeling-and–will generated subjective determination (existentialism) on the one hand or, on the other, a meticulous analysis of some part of external reality (in this case, human language, as in analytical philosophies) or of the whole of external reality (modern structuralism, which will be discussed later, and Marxism).

Thus we see five out of the eight different dynamic systems of modern Western philosophy trying to ground themselves in either subjective consciousness (existentialism and phenomenology) or in an analysis of external reality (linguistic analysis, structuralism, and Marxism). The three other systems, which are more speculative, that is, neo-Thomism, Whiteheadian process philosophy, and Bergsonian or Teilhardian duration philosophies are different from these precisely in terms of a heavier dependence on a religious tradition.[3]

The Three Pramānas

In India traditionally we have always held the pramānas to be three, pratyaksha, anumana and agama or sabda. In fact the same three principles are acknowledged also in European medieval scholastic philosophy, though not quite clearly enumerated as three. These three pramānas or principles corresponded also to the three fundamental realities to be known—the world was intuited as pratyaksha, the self supplies the anumana, and God, or Easwara or Brahman, is known by agama or sabda.

Just as there is an ascending hierarchy of being between world, humanity, and God, the three pramānas also have an ascending order of superiority: Pratyaksha comes from the sense, anumana coming from reason is above that, and agama, or sabda, comes above all.

This hierarchy of principles was often used by religious leadership to affirm their own superiority since they are the custodians of the highest principle, namely scripture and tradition. This leads quite often to a society dominated socially and economically by the priestly class, as in medieval Europe as well as in India during certain periods of our history. (PEW 373–74)

University and Monastery:

A New Philosophical Alliance

There are at least three perspectives from which to proceed to an evaluation of the multifaceted personality of Sri Sankara the unparalleled Lokacharya of Haindawa Dharma.

One could see him as a passionate prophet and social reformer, waging battle against the ritualistic aberrations of Purva Mimamsa and also the priest-ridden distorions of eighth-century Buddhism. Here we are in need of research that can reconstruct at least some of the sociological background of his time. Very little information has become available to us so far about the state of the conflict between Hinduism and Buddhism in the time of Sankara. Did the Judaism that flourished in Musiris or Cranganore, only a dozen miles from Alwaye, Kerala, have any impact on him? Did the Arab traders, who must have brought Islam to Kerala Coast in the eighth century, encounter Sankara? Did he have only knowledge of the Christians, who were a flourishing community along these coasts and on the Madras coast in the seventh and eighth centuries? Clearly Sankara was the reviver of Upanishadic Hinduism and the prophet of Sankara Dharma. But what were the social forces and phenomena that shaped him? A prophet is thrown up by his time. We can hardly listen to his message today without knowing more about his time.

The kind of Christian tradition from which I come, that is, the Oriental Orthodox tradition in Christianity, agrees with Sankara in rejecting all dualism in ultimate reality. We deny any duality in Jesus Christ the God-man and affirm that God and man are now inseparably one. Even the Creator-creation dualism we do not accept as ultimately dual, since the creation has only a contingent existence and in  itself  is  vanity  and  nothingness.  Philosophically  only  the  non-dual understanding of reality can stand, whether it be in Vedanta or Christianity.

A second perspective is to see him as a thinker of the highest level of abstraction and logical consistency. His logic has been attacked by many, including other Lokacharyas like Ramanuja and Madhva, and the Puranas (Padma Purana for example) bear witness to an attack on his orthodoxy by contemporaries. But the fact is that the attacks on his conceptual structure have not yet been able to demolish it with any substantial effect. We still see today muscles flexed and fists folded at Sankara through structure by various would-be-philosophers both East  and  West.  But  the  structure  remains  basically  unscathed  by all  the  attacks  as  a  monument  to  intellectual  rigor  and  logical consistency.

A third and possibly more true perspective is to see Sankara as one who has experienced ultimate reality and speaks from the perspective of a siddha or jeevanmukta. Religious prophet Sankara certainly may have been. Thinker, he clearly was. But it is in the unmediated experience of reality, the aparoksha anubhuti of the self, that Sankara bases his system. The writings are not the truth. Sankara himself would be the first to admit that truth was beyond word and concept. The jeevanmukta is nirvikalpa and sees neither concept nor word to communicate  or  apprehend  truth.  He  is  himself  truth,  and  he  radiates truth. Was this not Sankara’s highest quality? The achievement of Brahmatma-bhava is quite independent of and distinct from philosophical erudition or metaphysical process. I wonder why philosophers pay more attention to the conceptual structure of Sankara’s thought than to the anubhuti that lies behind it. The truth is not Sankara’s philosophy but what Sankara realised.

Here I want to ask a final question. What is the purpose of darsana? Is it to arrive at a conceptual grasp of truth or to become a siddha by anubhuti? Nay, can one really become a Vedantin by simply studying the Upanishads, the Brahmasutras, the Bhagavadgita and the Bhashyas on them? I am quite sure that the answer to that question is a clear no.

If so, is it not also clear that the university is hardly the milieu in which to teach philosophy? It is conceivable that Nalanda and Takshasila as well as other ancient Indian universities did manage to impart some knowledge of philosophy to princes and nobles who came there in search of knowledge. There the basic system was that of the gurukula, the intimate milieu in which the guru shared his very life with his sishyas.

Our universities are notoriously incapable of creating genuine philosophers, it seems clear to me. They may help lay the foundations for anubhuti, but then boys and girls who were past the age of sixteen or eighteen would hardly constitute the ideal starting point for spiritual instruction. I have no doubt that the Mutt or Monastery is the right breeding ground for genuine darsana. But here too, our record is not altogether bright. With due respect to great swamis like Vinobaji or Ranganathananda, one must say that the combination that made Sankara great has yet to be manifested—the profound depth of spiritual experience expressing itself in a thought-structure of the utmost logical consistency and intellectual vigour.

Is it possible for us to conceive of a joint effort by the university faculty of philosophy and an ashram or a mutt that is genuinely interested in philosophy to be the milieu for creating philosophers in India for tomorrow? I am, as you see, pessimistic about university faculties producing great philosophers. I am also not very sanguine about the capacity of our mutts to produce genuine philosophers without the intellectual disciplines of the university being injected into it. We need a milieu that is rooted in our own spiritual tradition but capable of using the best technical logic, our own or Chinese or Western.

I am interested in a new Sankara in our present context—one who is a social reformer fighting against the evils of injustice, poverty, corruption, and indiscipline in society; one who is also a consistent thinker, who can give us a map of reality with conceptual clarity and intellectual attractiveness; but above all, one who has so realised truth that his very being radiates truth in love. We need today perhaps not so much an individual philosopher-genius like Sankara as a team of people who are dedicated to truth and love, who in their common life radiate a pattern for other people to emulate in community living and who are fully in touch with all the unspoken aspirations, uncertain gropings, and unclear questions of people everywhere in the world.

The university philosophical faculty as presently constituted seems unequipped to produce such a team. But a university faculty working in cooperation with a Mutt where there is an intensive discipline of not only controlling the body and mind but also of living together as a community of love may be able to make a beginning. After all, if philosophy has to be founded ultimately on experience, and if the university is unable to provide an adequate laboratory for such experience, why not use a good mutt to provide the milieu for students to develop the experience on the basis of which they can philosophise? (PEW 61–64)

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Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1973), 107. ↵

This particular definition is taken from Andrew J. Reck, Wilmon H. Sheldon’s Philosophy, in On the Nature of the Philosophical Enterprise, Tulane Studies in Philosophy 7 (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1958), 111. ↵

This dependence is less obvious in both Whitehead and Bergson compared to Teilhard de Chardin. But the dependence in both cases is not difficult to establish. ↵

European Philosophy and Enlightenment

What Is the European Enlightenment?

Briefly put, the European Enlightenment is a spiritual-intellectual fever that spread among the European peoples from about the middle of the eighteenth century. The fever has not yet subsided. In that sense the Enlightenment remains unfinished. It has only begun to manifest some of its secondary symptoms. It has affected the mental, moral, and aesthetic tastes of the people brought under its influence all over the world.

At least five aspects of the European Enlightenment need to be held together in order to provide an elementary understanding of this unique phenomenon that broke out in Europe in the eighteenth century and has managed to shape or misshape the entire world in two centuries. There is no way of understanding the various trends and struggles that we outlined in chapter 1 of this book without some grasp of the nature of the European Enlightenment. We insist on calling it the European Enlightenment (sometimes EE for short) in order to distinguish it from the various other historical instances of enlightenment in other parts of the world (e.g., the great Buddhist Enlightenment in the sixth century BCE in India).

Briefly stated, the five elements are:

Some special features of European identity that seem to endure through the centuries and shape the actions of European nations and peoples

The particular political and socio-economic conditions of Europe in the eighteenth century and after

Religious-philosophical ideas that suddenly sprang up in Europe in the eighteenth century, following the collapse of the metaphysical systems that sought to replace religious philosophy

The new movements in the areas of arts and literature in Europe

The development of modern science and the technology based on it

We shall discuss some of these aspects that powered the European Enlightenment after some preliminary remarks. (LTB 29–30)

The Philosophical Background

Perhaps it was easier for the eighteenth-century thinkers to define the Enlightenment when the process was wily beginning to be clearly noticed. Around 1784, five years before the French Revolution, the discussion gets started in the Berlinische Monatsschrift on the question "Was ist Aufklaerung?" The great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn wrote in the September 1784 issue:

The words Enlightenment, Culture and Education (Aufklaerung, Kultur, Bildung—Enlightenment, Culture, Image) are still newcomers in our language (i.e., in German). They belong at present to the language of the elite (Baichersprache). The common people understand nothing of all this. Should this be taken to mean that the substance of it is still quite new to us? I do not think so. . . . Education, Culture and Enlightenment are modifications of social life, effects of the drives and desires of human beings to better their social existence.[1]

Mendelssohn makes the interesting distinction between human enlightenment (Menschenaufklaerung) and the citizen’s or bourgeois enlightenment (Buergeraufklaerung). He thinks the two can be in conflict and was not quite ready to start out with the Enlightenment of the whole of humanity. In fact, he and many others thought that it would be disastrous to extend the Enlightenment to the common people; it would make